Insightfully portrays an ailing American health system and ways to improve one’s health.
An American-trained pharmacist discusses the shortcomings of traditional Western medicine and advocates natural approaches to health care and wellness.
Ali writes with refreshing candor about her disillusionment with traditional medicine. After receiving her degree as a doctor of pharmacy and taking a position as a well-paid pharmacist, the author found herself unfulfilled and “essentially working a retail job” instead of using her knowledge to help sick people. Her career dissatisfaction led to financial and personal setbacks, until eventually, Ali read a book recommended by a friend—Cleanse and Purify Thyself by Richard Anderson, which claims “that 99 percent of known human disease is caused by what we eat.” The book changed her life and led to personal and professional epiphanies: She was “off-balance” and so was the American health care system. Ali writes, “[i]t eventually became very clear to me that many standard medical treatments are manufactured in order to: Create long-term customers; Provide patients with temporary comfort; Specifically, NOT treat the underlying cause.” In 15 chapters, Ali addresses topics such as “What’s Wrong with American Medicine?”; “Cleansing and Detox”; “Weight Loss”; “Pain”; and “Starting Your Holistic Journey”. She believes that, for centuries, people used natural remedies; however, the early 20th century brought about a paradigm shift in health care treatment in which the American Medical Association, the Food and Drug Administration, and large pharmaceutical and insurance companies created a profit-driven system that doesn’t prevent illness or cure it but perpetuates customers who “will turn to drugs in their time of sickness.” The book includes insightful interviews with alternative healing practitioners as well as individuals who’ve reclaimed their health through natural means after the American health care system failed them. Chapters begin with pithy quotes and color cartoon illustrations, and there are colorful charts, interview balloons and chapter summaries, too. In an age of mandated American health insurance, in which “drugs are covered by insurance, [but] holistic solutions are not,” Ali offers a thoughtful guide for those seeking another path.
Insightfully portrays an ailing American health system and ways to improve one’s health.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0985345204
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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